


Come Up to Meet You (Tell You I'm Sorry)

by HowCleverOfYou



Series: Nobody Said It Was Easy [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Future Fic, Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-31
Updated: 2013-07-31
Packaged: 2017-12-22 00:32:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/906801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HowCleverOfYou/pseuds/HowCleverOfYou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Allison and Scott come back.</p><p>Sequel to "It's Such a Shame For Us to Part." (You will have no idea what's going on if you don't read that first.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Up to Meet You (Tell You I'm Sorry)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xinio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xinio/gifts).



> for my lil bitch mal. I named a baby after you!

Stiles is laying half on top of him, cheek resting on Isaac’s stomach and his eyes drifting shut. Isaac has one hand carding through the short hair on the back of Stiles’ head. It’s Friday night and Victoria is next door playing with the neighbor’s kid Helen and sometimes Isaac wishes they could spend every night like this, quiet and slow and almost too-warm skin.

“I think I like you best like this,” Isaac says. The only light in the room comes from the moon behind the curtains and the glowing green numbers on the alarm clock. “You look so happy.”

Stiles turns his face to leave a gentle bite on Isaac’s stomach. “Of course I’m happy. Though I am questioning your taste in men. Do you seriously like this better than me in an apron with pancakes?”

The blankets are everywhere, tangled in strange places and bunched up under Stiles’s stomach. It’s twisted around his back and between his legs and Isaac can see his left ass cheek and the fading bruises there. But Stiles looks sleepy and blissed out and he thinks it’s wonderful.

“I like you in an apron,” he says. He drags his thumbnail against Stiles’ scapha and his fingers goes back around to the slope of his shoulders. He thinks of Stiles in the morning, stove-warm and happy, lifting Victoria up to the countertop to flip a pancake on the griddle. “But I like you like this, too.” He stretches up and slaps Stiles’ ass. Stiles yelps and reaches out to grab his hand.

“So that’s what this is about,” he says, pulling himself up so his knees are on either side of Isaac’s hips. He leans down to kiss him, tongue nudging Isaac’s mouth apart, elbows locked against his shoulders and one hand tangled  amongst his curls.

Isaac makes a sound that hasn’t been embarrassing for a long time and Stiles rolls his hips up, knocking up against Isaac’s pelvis. Isaac flails wildly and winds his arm around the base of Stiles’ back and dances his feet around, trying to find somewhere to hook onto to gain more friction.

The doorbell buzzes downstairs and they both freeze. Stiles picks his head up and looks around as if something in their dark bedroom is going to give him an answer. He looks down at Isaac. “Anything?”

Isaac’s brain is still short-circuiting from the weight of Stiles half-hard against him, but he presses a hand against his forehead to try and clear his brain. He listens for any movement outside. “Two people. I don’t know if they’re wolves or not.” He can’t smell anything over Stiles – a mixture of cologne, arousal, and release.

Stiles climbs off of him and roots around on the ground for his underpants. The doorbell rings again, this time coupled with urgent knocking. “Who the fuck is coming around this late?”

Isaac gets out of bed too and they dress quickly and quietly. He strains to hear any noise, but Stiles’ heartbeat is going a mile a minute and that’s too damn distracting. He’s out of practice. If there was a problem with Victoria, the neighbors would call. Other than that, he can’t think of a single person – _two_ people – who would be at their door this late on a Friday night.

“Grab the shotgun and I’ll get the door,” Isaac whispers.

“You think the wolves are going to be polite enough to knock?” Stiles hisses at him. “Maybe they brought a casserole, too.”

They steal down the stairs and into the hall, where Stiles gets the shotgun and wolfsbane bullets out of the closet. He loads the gun quickly and efficiently and it almost scares Isaac that he can do it so well. He watches Stiles disappear behind the doorway of the dark living room, then tiptoes over to the door, barefoot, and steels himself before opening it up.

“Fuck, Isaac,” Scott yelps on the other side of the door. He falls down the two steps on the porch. Stiles jumps out from behind the door and stares out at the dark figure sprawled at the bottom of the stairs.

“ _Scott_?”

Isaac’s nails retract and his fingers reappear. They both watch Scott get up and then the three of them just stand staring at each other. Scott keeps scrunching his face like he’s going to sneeze, and then he chokes out, “I can’t smell anything over these flowers.”

“That’s why we put them there, dumbass,” Stiles says. They watch Scott wheeze in the grass and Stiles’ heart upticks when he asks, “Didn’t you say there was another person?”

“Just me,” Allison says quickly, appearing in the doorway from the side of the porch. She has her shoulders bunched up around her ears and her hands up. “Don’t shoot.”

Isaac realizes belatedly that Stiles still has the shotgun in his hand.

“Hey,” Stiles says, raising his hands too. “It’s cool. I’m just gonna go put this back in the closet.” He walks backwards and Isaac hopes to god that this isn’t one of those times when he goes sprawling across the hall rug.

“Can we come in?” Allison asks, and Isaac nods and goes to flick on the hall light. He waits until Allison and Scott go into the living room before bolting the door shut and turning to Stiles.

“What does this mean?” Stiles asks in an undertone. Isaac misses how relaxed he had been not ten minutes before, his skin soft and warm and his mouth smiling. Now he’s all hard lines, the furrow of his brow hovering between worried and confused.

“It means we’re not going to be finishing date night,” Isaac says. He tries to give Stiles a reassuring smile but Stiles just drops his head against Isaac’s shoulder and sighs into the tee shirt that’s probably his own. Isaac wasn’t really focused on dressing up.

When they walk into the living room, the first thing Scott says is, “So when did this happen?”

Stiles is staring at Scott in shock and anger. Isaac can hear his blood pressure rising and he knows Scott can too.

“It’s been four fucking years, Scott,” Stiles says, his voice shaking as he measures it out. He’s keeping it quieter than he would be if Isaac wasn’t there, and that’s something Isaac notices and appreciate. He knows it’s difficult for someone like Stiles, with his sharp movements and constant noises, to control. “How dare you come into this house and ask me that.”

Scott puts his hands up defensively and Isaac finally gets a good look at them both. Scott is thinner but still muscular and he’s got a raggedy beard that’s cut close to his face. There’s a short scar running across his forehead, but he looks otherwise the same. Allison is more filled out and her hair is in a messy pixie cut. She’s wearing a tank top and a pair of dirty jeans and Isaac can see the bite on the inside of her arm, old and faded, and it makes him wonder more than ever what had happened.

“You both smell different,” he observes. Stiles turns to go and stand in the doorway, facing the hall. Isaac can hear him trying to control his breathing.

“We had to change it,” Scott says. “It took a lot, but we did it. We were untraceable for a while.”

Isaac’s eyes slide over Allison and he wonders what happened to the sweet girl he had known all those years ago. Now her eyes are hard and she’s shaking slightly like she’s ready to bolt.

“What happened?” he asks.

Scott opens his mouth to respond but Allison cuts across him. “Where’s Victoria?”

“She’s at the neighbor’s house.”

“I want to see her.”

Stiles turns on his heel and stalks back up to stand next to Isaac. “Answer the question first.”

“Hey, okay,” Scott says, putting his hands up to placate Stiles. “There was another pack of Alphas. They were threatening me. I had to lead them away from Beacon Hills or else they would’ve butchered the whole town.”

Isaac gets the distinct feeling that they’re not getting the whole story. “So why take Allison?” he asks. “Why not take Victoria?”

Scott drops his head down and runs his hands up through his hair. Isaac remembers watching those movements with bated breath, wishing he could be doing that instead. When he speaks, it jolts Isaac out of his memories. “We worked for them, okay? They promised they would stay away if we ran with them. If _I_ ran with them, but she wouldn’t let me go alone. Victoria wouldn’t have been safe.”

“So what?” Stiles says. “You had a little prison break? Dug out of your cages with little spoons?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. But we weren’t in cages. A lot of the underdogs were unhappy with the way things were going, so it was easy to establish a group of rebels. Once we took out the leaders, we all had to lay low for a bit in case someone caught wind of what we’d done. It’s been a year since we killed them and there’s been nothing, so we decided it was safe to come back.”

“And endanger the whole town,” Stiles accuses. “Endanger your daughter.”

“Why do you think we left her with you?” Scott asks. He gets up off the couch but doesn’t come any closer. His fists are clenching and unclenching at his sides and Isaac can hear him forcing down his anger. “We knew you’d never let anyone hurt her.”

“I want to forgive you, Scott,” Stiles says. “But this is really un-fucking-believable.”

Scott looks vaguely offended by this.

“You had a whole pack of wolves on your side, not to mention a whole fuckload of humans. Do you think we wouldn’t have tried to help you if you’d said something?”

“I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. If I’d said something, I know you guys would have tried to help. It would have been leading you all to slaughter.”

“That’s what your pack is for,” Stiles says, voice wavering. Isaac wants to take him back upstairs and bury him beneath the blankets. “That’s what your _friends_ are for.”

“Do you guys want anything to eat?” Isaac asks. He just wants to break the tension, maybe have Stiles and Scott finish this up themselves. “Allison, you want to help me make some sandwiches?”

She nods and pushes herself up off of the couch. They walk together towards the kitchen in silence, listening to Scott and Stiles start arguing again but not paying attention to the words.

Isaac doesn’t realize he’s alone until he opens the refrigerator. He pokes his head out into the hall to see Allison staring at the wall of photographs framed on the wall boxing in the staircase. Isaac moves to stand next to her.

“She’s so beautiful,” Allison says quietly. She reaches out to brush her fingers along one of the frames. It’s a picture from last year, Fourth of July, when Stiles had dyed his hair red, white, and blue. It’s of the three of them, taken by the mother of a girl they used to go to school with, sitting on a bench outside the post office watching the parade. Stiles is smiling big for the camera but Isaac is watching Victoria laugh gleefully as he tickles her.

“So are you.” Allison looks at him and she has the saddest expression on her face. Isaac thinks that maybe he’s going to reach up and touch his face but he turns and goes into the kitchen before she has the chance.

They make sandwiches quietly and stack them up on a plate. Allison stops every once in a while to inspect things in the kitchen – the handprint impression they’d made with Victoria out of the clay; the artwork stuck up on the refrigerator with magnets; the educational placemats set up around the kitchen table. She runs her fingers over the one that explains the planets and smiles.

When they bring the plate back into the living room, Stiles and Scott are both sitting on opposite couches, but the tension seems to have settled a bit. Isaac still feels a little bit numb. Allison sets the sandwiches down on the table and Isaac passes around the beers he’s holding between his fingers.

When he sits down shoulder-to-shoulder with Stiles, Scott gestures between them and says, “Can I ask now?”

Stiles rubs at the back of his neck and says, “I don’t know. We were kind of… getting there, you know, before you guys left. I guess once we were left alone it kind of sped things up a bit.”

Three weeks after Scott and Allison left, they had been standing over the crib watching Victoria sleep. They were both tired and Stiles had spit-up on his shirt, but Isaac had been overcome with the intense desire to kiss him. So he’d whispered, “Stiles,” and Stiles had looked over at him, eyes half-drifting shut, and Isaac had just leaned forward and pressed their mouths together.

Stiles had leaned into him slightly, but when they pulled apart Stiles didn’t do anything more than suck his own bottom lip into his mouth. Then they’d drifted apart, back to their respective places – Isaac down on the couch and Stiles in the guest room.

The next morning Stiles had kissed him up against the countertop in the kitchen. It was another four days – and Isaac’s turn to use the bed – before he had said, “You should stay upstairs with me.” It was another week and a half before Stiles had stripped down and let Isaac touch him.

He knew Stiles was angry that they hadn’t had the opportunity to develop as a couple outside of the four walls of the McCall house, but they’d survived four years with limited alone time and Isaac thinks that’s pretty great. He has to agree, though – he would’ve liked the secrecy of sneaking in through Stiles’ bedroom window, or Skyping in the middle of the night while they were apart at college, or stealing kisses in the locker room after lacrosse practice.

Every time they talk about the things that could have happened between them before, Isaac reminds Stiles that they still got to do things like go to Comic Con – with Victoria dressed as an Ewok and strapped to his back – and stay up until midnight to watch the ball drop in Times Square and play video games on Scott’s old XBOX. They could still act their age – they just had to adjust a little bit to take care of the baby.

“A lot’s changed in the last four years, Scott,” Stiles says, pulling the crust off his sandwich. Isaac knows he likes to eat them last and adds his own crust to the growing pile at the corner of the serving platter. “Were you not expecting that?”

“I just didn’t expect things to change so much.” Scott rubs at the back of his neck and takes a swig of his beer. “Last I remember, you were still head-over-heels for Lydia.”

“She’s married, now,” Isaac supplies. “One little boy, but they’re trying for another. Vic and Cason get along really well.”

“What about Derek?”

Stiles shakes his head slowly, lips pouted in a _I don’t know_ gesture. “We see him sometimes, so we know he’s keeping an eye on the house and on Victoria. But we haven’t talked to him in a long time.”

“Can we see her?” Scott asks.

Isaac shakes his head. “Not until tomorrow.”

“She’s next door,” Allison says. She sits up straight and Isaac realizes that this is the first thing she’s said since the hallway. “We could go and get her now.”

“You waited four years,” Stiles says. “You can wait one night.”

Scott looks like he’s about to argue, but Isaac shakes his head. “Come on. Let’s get some sleep. You two look like you could do with a shower.” He gets up to put the sandwiches in the refrigerator while Stiles stays on the couch to stew. Scott nods and stands as well and it takes a little coaxing for Allison to follow. “You guys can sleep in your mom’s old room if you want. Victoria kind of took over yours.”

“Where do you sleep?”

“The guest room.”

Scott looks flabbergasted. “Why?”

Isaac shrugs. “It just didn’t feel right.” They start towards the door, but Isaac says, “Hey,” and puts the plate down. He holds out a hand to Scott. “It’s good to have you back.”

“It’s good to _be_ back.” Scott smiles and shakes his hand, then pulls him in for a one-armed hug. Isaac smiles and watches them go, then goes down the hall and into the kitchen. Stiles follows eventually and moves up against him so Isaac can wind his arms around his waist.

“Let’s rewind two hours,” he mumbles against Isaac’s shoulder. He fists one hand in the back of his shirt. “When you were trying to seduce me with your stupid knock knock jokes.”

“Knock knock,” Isaac says. He starts to move them both towards the hallway without breaking apart. It’s a lot of swinging and stepping but Stiles is giggling against his neck so it’s okay.

“Oh my God,” Stiles says.

“Knock _knock_.”

Stiles rolls his eyes and says, “ _Who’s there_ ,” as they round the corner into the hallway, all tangled up.

“Dishes.”

“Dishes, who?”

“Dishes the FBI, open up.”

Stiles throws his head back in overenthusiastic laughter and Isaac presses him against the newel at the base of the stairs. Isaac can almost forget that Scott and Allison are upstairs even though he can hear the shower start to run and their voices murmuring. He presses his face against Stiles’ temple and fills his hearing with the sound of his thumping heart and the laugh as it dies out.

“You’re so dumb.” He says it like it’s no big deal but it took a long time for Isaac to read into that a little bit deeper, to not take comments like that at face value. For every offhanded derogatory comment that Stiles doesn’t mean, his looks and touches and smiles fill in the rest of the picture.

Isaac gets a thumb under Stiles’ jaw and tilts his head back so their mouths can slot together.

“They ruined date night.”

“We could still continue.” Stiles bumps their noses. “Payback for all the time Scott was gone for. What’s a little bit of listening to your friends have loud monkey sex to shock him back to the present?”

“Never took you as a voyeur.” Isaac steps back a little bit and looks up the stairs. “We should get some rest though. It’s going to be a long, emotional day tomorrow.”

“I liked my idea better.” Isaac kisses him one last time, grinning into his mouth, before he pulls Stiles up the stairs. “They can smell it all over us, what’s a little bit more gonna do?”

“Go brush your teeth, you weirdo.” Scott and Allison are in Melissa’s bedroom so Isaac shoves him into the hall one and pulls the door shut. He keeps his grip loose enough so Stiles can get out if he really wants to (remembers the time Stiles had trapped him in the bathroom, forgetting, and spent the next three hours trying to calm Isaac down), but tight enough that when Stiles jiggles the doorknob he gets the point.

“You’re a cruel man, Isaac Lahey,” Stiles says. He flicks on the bathroom light and Isaac can see it flood out from underneath the door. Satisfied, he goes into their bedroom to clean up a little bit. He puts new sheets from the closet on the bed and buries the condom and lube in their underwear drawer, where Victoria can’t reach. Then he shuts the door and changes quickly into a pair of sweatpants before going to join Stiles in the bathroom.

He has a mouthful of Listerine when Isaac walks in and quirks his eyebrows a little bit while he rakes his eyes over Isaac’s bare chest. It took Isaac a long time to get used to being looked at like that – first it scared him a lot, then it made him feel a little bit sexy, but now he rolls his eyes and reaches across the sink to get his toothbrush. When Stiles spits, he gets some mouthwash on Isaac’s elbow, and that starts a tussle when Isaac tries to wipe it off on Stiles’ shirt.

As Stiles flees to the bedroom, Isaac wonders when they got to be like this. He can remember a time when he had sneered at the very thought of brushing shoulders with Stiles; but now it’s sharing a bed and falling asleep on the couch slumped against his side and pressing a mug of coffee into his hands in the morning. It’s strange to think of things that happened before Victoria came along but there had been twenty years there and it’s easy to forget where they all came from, even if they’ve been living in Scott McCall’s childhood home.

When Isaac gets back to the bedroom, the lights are already off and Stiles is buried underneath the blankets. He shuts the door behind him and crawls into bed as well, smiling when Stiles automatically reaches for him. He’s wearing Isaac’s old Beacon Hills Lacrosse shirt and a pair of boxers and he smells like mint.

“What if we can’t trust him?” Stiles asks quietly after a while. If Isaac hadn’t been listening to his heartbeat like a lullaby he would’ve thought that Stiles was asleep. He tries not to tap into the part of his senses that tell him what Stiles is feeling because they both feel like it’s an invasion of privacy, but the uncertainty and fear is wafting off of him. “What if he’s still working for them and led the wolves here?”

“He wouldn’t do that to us,” Isaac says sleepily. “Not to us, and definitely not to her.”

Stiles nods against him, but Isaac knows he isn’t fully convinced.

“What are you going to do?” he says a few minutes later.

“What do you mean?” Isaac doesn’t want to give up Victoria, hands down. He knows Stiles doesn’t either. He has no clue what’s going to happen tomorrow or how they’re going to get out of giving her back to Allison and Scott. Honestly, he doesn’t know if they’re going to be able to.

“Me and Scott,” Stiles says, then sits up. Isaac whines involuntarily as the cold air hits him so he leans up against the headboard. “Look, before you make your decision, let me make my case, okay? Scott’s not going to choose you. He has Allison and he has Vic and, I’m sorry, he was never going to choose you. But I’m – I love you, okay? We have four years under our belt and we haven’t managed to, you know, kill Victoria yet, but I like waking up in the morning next to you, and when people ask me where my wife is, I like to point you out and say, ‘No, that’s my boyfriend,’ and yeah, okay, I’ll admit it, I like those weird flat bagel things you like to buy, even if like 90% of the bagel is missing. And if you want to, I don’t know, go back to pining around Scott, I’m going to be supremely pissed off, because I want you to choose me always.”

Isaac stares, open-mouthed, as Stiles finishes his spiel. He wants to say _yes, god, I could never love anyone as much as I love you_ , but the words get caught in his throat and he chokes out, “You love me?” instead. As soon as he says it, he feel stupid, because they’ve probably said that to each other a hundred thousand times.

Stiles looks back at him like he’s stupid. “Why else would I have stayed with you for this long?”

“I don’t know,” Isaac says. The nerves start to fire in his hands and arms like they do when he’s nervous and he flexes them against the bed sheets. He’s never said anything about it to Stiles before because he’s locked it away with all of his other insecurities. “Comfort. Ease.”

“What do you –“ Stiles cuts himself off and rubs both hands across his face. “What are you talking about?”

“You were sad when Scott left,” Isaac says. “I was here so you turned to me for comfort. And then it was easy, because I was here. You fell in love with me because there was nobody else to fall in love with.”

“God,” Stiles says abruptly. “I want to slap you in the face right now. You seriously think I’ve stayed with you for _four years_ because it’s _easy_? Isaac, we are anything but easy. We don’t get to act our age because we have a kid that isn’t even biologically ours to raise, and we get in stupid fights over things like who put the toaster away or what time Dora’s on and there’s the fact that, oh, we’re constantly in fear of getting mauled to death by angry werewolves. Don’t you remember how long it took before we were comfortable enough to go about a normal life? Six months. It was six months, Isaac, cooped up in this house and scared to split up. You gave me the strength to move past that.”

Isaac’s mouth twists into a sardonic smile because the thought of him giving anyone strength is laughable.

“No, don’t – this isn’t _funny_. It isn’t funny that you’re your own biggest enemy and that I spend so much time trying thinking of ways to save you from yourself. I’m so glad you grew out of your arrogance because it’s just _you_ now and not _fifty different shades_ of you, but you’re confident in everything except for yourself as a person. But you don’t – you don’t _listen_ when I tell you how great you are and I wonder sometimes if you like being this miserable thing because it’s easy to blame yourself. But you’re not always wrong, Isaac, okay.”

“The thought of choosing him never crossed my mind, by the way,” Isaac says because he doesn’t want to talk about himself anymore. It’s hard to hear Stiles say things like that because, as far as Isaac is concerned, they’re talking about a completely different person. Someone who is worthy of the way Stiles describes him; someone who is not Isaac, because Isaac doesn’t love himself enough to understand that someone loves him. “I’m not going to leave you just because he’s back.”

Stiles stares at him for a long moment. “Why did you let me go on that big rant, then? God.” He runs a hand over the back of his head, embarrassed.  Then he presses his hands against his face and whispers, “I love you.”

Isaac lies down and tugs at Stiles’ arm until he lets himself be pulled against Isaac’s chest. He comes out from behind his hands and tucks an arm around Isaac’s waist. They lay in silence, Stiles resting his head on Isaac’s shoulder, and Isaac finally lets out the words he feels constricted in his chest: “I love you. A lot. Sometimes I think about how much I hated you before and I feel sad for that person because he didn’t _know._ I don’t hate myself as much as I used to.” The room stays quiet and he backtracks quickly: “Sorry, I’m bad at saying things, I’m sorry—“

Stiles looks up to kiss his chin. “I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.”

“I,” he responds coherently, but Stiles jostles him a little bit.

“Now go to sleep,” he says. “You’ve gotta go pick Vic up tomorrow.”

xxx

Helen’s mom gives Isaac a knowing look when he goes to pick up Victoria the next morning, like it isn’t wrong to acknowledge your much younger neighbors’ sex life. Helen is the youngest by twenty years and Isaac sometimes remembers that her mom is old enough to be _his_ mom.

“Did you have a good time?” she asks when she opens the door.

“We, uh, we had some visitors, actually,” Isaac says, and for a second she gets this look on her face that makes Isaac think she’s thinking things that _should not be thought._ He widens his eyes and shakes his head. “No, no, uh, Stiles’ brother came in unexpectedly.” He doesn’t want to say _so we didn’t get to finish our date night_ because the thought of discussing these things with anyone but Stiles makes him feel uncomfortable.

“Oh!” Helen’s mom says (and maybe he needs to learn her name at some point). “That sounds great. Victoria and Helen are playing upstairs, if you’ll give me a second to go get them.”

Victoria clings onto Isaac as soon as she sees him. She’s talking a mile a minute, telling him all about what she and Helen had gotten up to, before they even make it out the front door. He laughs in that way that the other dads do, waves at Helen’s mom, and takes Vic by the hand. She gives him a kiss on the wrist as they cross the short distance between the houses.

“Hey, Vic,” Isaac says before they reach the front porch. She stops her spiel and looks up at him.

“Yeah, Papa?”

“Daddy and I have some friends over. Remember Daddy’s friend Scott? The one in the pictures?”

“The one with the funny smile,” she says, giggling.

“Would you like to meet him?”

“Yes.” He crouches down in front of her and she steps into his arms. “But Papa, it’s Saturday. We watch movies on Saturday.”

“I know, sweetheart.” He kisses the top of her head. “The grownups have to talk for a little bit, but maybe Scott and his friend Allison can watch our movies, too?”

“Maybe.” She gives a short little sigh and adjusts the straps to her little backpack. “Hey, Papa, can we make pancakes for breakfast?”

“I think your Daddy’s already on top of that,” he laughs. She gives an excited squeak and runs for the door. Isaac takes the stairs in one step and twists the knob for her. She runs full force into the house, dark pigtails swinging behind her.

Isaac catches up with her in the kitchen, where she’s perched against Stiles’ hip.

“Helen and I watched The Little Mermaid,” she’s telling Stiles, who is listening with rapt attention, a small smile on his face. When he meets Isaac’s gaze, his grin grows. “Then we played with her Barbies. She has the one with the doggies. Hey, can I flip a pancake?”

Isaac can hear Scott and Allison starting to move around upstairs and he feels suddenly very uneasy. For the first several months after they had gone, Stiles and Isaac had talked about how much they wished the two of them would come back. But then Victoria had said her first word (it was wolf, and if Stiles’ reaction to that wasn’t hilarious Isaac doesn’t know what is) and learned to ride her first tricycle and started tucking herself into Isaac’s side as he read in bed or on the couch. She watched television with them and sang in the kitchen and she was suddenly a _person_ and suddenly someone they both loved very much.

They had been lying in bed the night after Victoria’s first birthday when Stiles had sucked in a deep, shaky breath and said what they’d both been too scared to say out loud: “I don’t know if I want Scott to come back.”

Stiles must hear the movement upstairs too because he glances up at the ceiling for a split second before putting on his fake cheer. Isaac sits down at the counter and watches Stiles and Victoria flip pancakes and dance around singing Never Gonna Give You Up.

Scott stays in the doorway watching when he finally comes trudging down the stairs. Isaac splits his gaze between him and Victoria, who is spinning, arms thrown out wide. She stops suddenly and gives an over-exaggerated wobble, falling up against Stiles’ leg and planting herself there. She squeaks and makes noises up against his pant leg.

“Come on, pup, time for pancakes.” Stiles passes the plate across the counter to Isaac and begins his trek to the table, all forty pounds of Victoria wrapped around his leg. “Excuse me, I’m not made of muscle like your Papa over there.”

She says something but it’s mumbled against his leg and Isaac is too distracted by Scott, who clears his throat and stands up straight in the doorway, to give her his full attention. Scott meets Isaac’s eyes and raises his eyebrows, asking permission. Isaac feels an overwhelming sense of how _strange_ this is, Scott asking _Isaac_ if he’s allowed to talk to his own daughter. Isaac nods a little bit numbly.

“Hey, Victoria,” he says, stepping fully into the kitchen and approaching the table. He smiles at her as she untangles herself from Stiles’ leg. “I’m Scott. I’m, uh…” He trails off and shoots Isaac a nervous look.

“You’re Daddy’s friend,” Vic says for him. She sits down at the table next to Stiles. “Why do you have a beard?”

Scott runs a hand across his face like he hadn’t noticed it was there. “Oh. I don’t know. What do you think of it?”

“You look funny,” she decides. “Papa, pancakes.”

Isaac doesn’t realize he’s still holding the plate until she says this and promptly brings it over to the table. He feels uncomfortable, like his skin is too tight, and he wants to push Scott and Allison outside and build a pillow fort with Stiles and Vic for their Saturday movie. Yesterday morning he and Victoria made a mansion out of Legos while Stiles was at work, then baked cookies and colored in coloring books in front of the TV. And then she’d gone to see Helen, and Stiles came home and kissed him up against the front door, and then Allison and Scott showed up and it scared Isaac how fast everything had changed.

Scott sits down across from Victoria and Isaac can see uncertainty in every line of his body. His movements are stilted and unsure so he tries giving him a reassuring smile.

“Why don’t you tell us about your sleepover?” he says to Victoria and she beams and launches into another story about Helen’s Barbie dogs. Scott listens, smiling, but the way he nods along is different than the way Stiles does, especially when Stiles goes, “Does she have barber shop Barbie, too?”

“Yes,” she says, eyes big and round, and Isaac notices – certainly not for the first time – that she’s got all of Scott’s dark features. “She has a Dream House, too.”

“You have a Dream House,” Isaac tells her. He knows because it took three hours to put together.

“Yeah, but she has the _big_ one.”

“Oh,” Isaac says while Stiles laughs. “Pardon me.”

Scott starts to relax as breakfast progresses and he’s able to coax Allison back into her comfort zone when she finally decides to join them. She smiles shyly across the table at Vic, who says, “Hi. What’s your favorite color?”

While the two girls clean up (“Look at our cool dinosaur baggies, Allison!”), Scott, Stiles, and Isaac sit more or less huddled at the table.

“Do we tell her?” Isaac asks under his breath. He watches Vic place pancake by pancake into the freezer bag.

“She’s going to figure it out eventually,” Scott says. “You’re both dudes.”

Stiles just gives him a look.

“Yeah,” Isaac says, “but is it the right time?”

“Let’s go in the living room.” They get up from the table and he calls, “Hey, Vic, why don’t you sit at the table and draw us some pictures? Papa and I are going to talk to Scott and Allison.”

“Okay,” she says. “Can I have a juice box?”

Isaac leads Scott and Allison into the living room. He sits on one couch while they take the other and Stiles joins them a moment later.

“She looks just like Scott,” Allison says tearfully. She puts her head in her hands and Scott puts an arm around her, rubbing her back in slow circles.

“You guys did… wow.” He laughs a little bit.

“Why’d you pick us?” Stiles asks abruptly. “Like, why didn’t you give her to your mom or something? Where’d she even go?”

“We took her somewhere safe,” Scott answers. “Her and Mr. Argent both. We couldn’t risk the wolves getting ahold of them.”

“So why us?” Isaac repeats.

Scott splays out his fingers and looks down at them, considering. “We didn’t have much of a pack left. I trusted most that _you_ could protect her. And Stiles, I knew you would, too. And I hoped that you would be able to raise her into something amazing, someone better than she could’ve been on the run with me and Allison, and… I was right. I was right to trust both of you.”

“Where did you guys go?” Isaac asks, leaving no preamble for grateful thank you’s or ‘aww, Scott’s from Stiles. Besides, Scott might have talked to Stiles alone last night, but he still didn’t have a clear picture of what had been going on.

“We went north at first. Oregon, Washington; we went up to Vancouver for a while. And then we went north, then south, then came back out west. I don’t think there’s a state on the continental US we didn’t cover. We spent a long time somewhere in Missouri. I don’t know, man, I wish I could tell you more.”

A long silence follows as Isaac tries to piece it all together. He still doesn’t think Scott’s telling them the whole story, but he knows that they’re never going to get everything. He feels suspicious of Scott, but tries not to let it show.

The quiet is broken by Victoria, who rushes into the room and up to Allison and says, “I drew you a picture.”

Allison takes the sheet of paper from her and smiles down at it, eyes shining. “It’s beautiful.”

“That’s me,” Vic says, pointing. “And that’s you over there. We’re playing with my Barbie Dream House. And that’s my name down there, see? Victoria Stilinski. S-T-I-L-I-N-S-K-I. Daddy taught me a trick to spell it. Wanna hear?”

Isaac is struck with the sudden, overwhelming fear that they’re going to take her away. They’re going to be the ones to buy her the Barbie Dream House that Helen has and they’re going to be the ones who hang up her homework on the fridge and pack her lunch every day. She’s going to call herself by her birth name and not by the name she had begged to use after Isaac had said _no, she can’t take my father’s name, but she can take yours_. He wraps his arms around himself, elbows in his hands, and starts to shake.

Stiles winds an arm around his waist and Isaac leans into his touch. Victoria finishes narrating her picture and turns for their approval, then frowns. She runs off without a word, feet thumping as she climbs up the stairs.

Allison is still clutching the drawing like it’s something sacred.

Victoria appears again a moment later, weighed down with two of Isaac’s thicker sweaters. She drops them at his feet and begins to untangle them. When she has them apart, she hands him the gray sweater and wraps herself in the brown knit without a word.

Isaac puts the sweater on and wonders how she knew it was exactly what he’d needed.

“What are those for?” Scott asks her lightly. She rolls up her sleeves, which is an incredible feat, since Isaac’s arms are about six or seven of hers.

“Papa wears them when he’s sad,” she tells Scott, then climbs up onto the couch and snuggles into Isaac’s side. She tucks her whole body into the sweater so all they can see is a lump of brown knit and a shock of black hair.

The room fills with silence again. Nobody knows what they can and can’t say around her.

Finally, Stiles goes, “So, what are you… what do you want? From us?”

Scott sits forward, resting his elbows on his knees. Allison pulls her feet up onto the couch and rests her chin on her knees.

“I want her,” she says, so quietly that Isaac doubts Stiles can hear her without heightened senses. “I want her so badly.”

“It’s not,” Stiles says, and breaks off with a frustrated noise. Apparently he’d inferred exactly what she said. “It’s not like it’s been four months. It’s been _four years_. I loved her the second she was born because she was yours, and then you gave her to us and then I loved her because she was _ours_. I know I can’t change how much you love her because there’s nothing like the love of biological parents but there’s nothing like the love of two people who raised you, either. We changed her diapers and potty-trained her and took care of her when she had pneumonia. We thought she was going to _die_. Do you know how that feels? It’s been _four goddamn years_ , Scott, you can’t just waltz in here and expect us to have her gift-wrapped and ready to go.”

Scott rubs across his mouth and looks over at Allison, who’s crying. Victoria snuggles closer to Isaac’s side and he knows she has no idea what’s going on but she probably feels the tension in the room.

“What if we let you adopt her,” Scott forces himself to say. Allison lets out a broken sound. “Can we still see her?”

“Yes,” Stiles says, voice tight like he’s still on the defensive.

“I want her,” Scott says, “but I don’t think she’ll ever love us like she loves you. I don’t – four years. I’m not her dad.”

When Allison breaks down, she gets up and goes outside. Isaac blocks out the sound of her sobbing but Scott closes his eyes like his heart is aching.

“It’s all she’s ever wanted since we left,” he says quietly. “To have her back. To finally be a real family.”

“You can have other kids,” Stiles says, and Isaac thinks, _that’s not fair_. Scott could be telling them the same thing. But it’s still – _we can have other kids, but we want_ this _one_. “You can – please. Please have other children. You can become a father overnight, but not a dad. Not a real one.”

“Stiles,” Isaac says and Stiles shuts his mouth with a click. He turns to Scott. “Thank you. Scott, thank you. From the very bottom of my heart.”

It takes another few hours to sort out the details. Scott cries and Isaac cries and Stiles keeps one hand fisted in Isaac’s sweater. Scott changes his mind half a dozen times and says things like, “I’ll learn,” and, “she doesn’t even know me,” and, “why did I let things get so out of hand?”

They catch up and Scott asks more about the two of them, about Victoria, about the people they’d known in high school. Isaac brings up Allison and how different she is. When he does, Scott gets this faraway look in his eye like something bad’s happened, and Isaac knows enough about bad memories to accept a little bit of a knowledge gap on this one.

Eventually, Scott gets up to go and find Allison, leaving the two of them alone. Victoria’s long since gone upstairs to play with her toys. Stiles leans heavily into Isaac’s side like a tremendous weight has just been taken off his shoulders.

He begins to laugh.

Isaac looks down at him through cry-swollen eyes and grins. “What?”

Stiles shakes his head, face crumpling, and his laughter turns to tears as he plants his hands on either side of Isaac’s face. “I love you,” he says fiercely. “We did it and I love you.”

 

_Epilogue_

Victoria is all bundled up in her scarf, coat, and mittens, and she holds Isaac’s hand when they cross the street. Stiles is trailing behind them with a bag full of old toys thrown over his shoulder.

“What’s he gonna look like?” Victoria asks.

“You know those pictures of you in your photo album?” Isaac asks. She nods. “He’ll look like that.”

“Was I a good baby?”

“You were a great baby,” he laughs. He looks over his shoulder at Stiles and they smile at each other.

There’s an IT’S A BOY! sign with a balloon in Allison and Scott’s front lawn and Victoria breaks away from Isaac when she sees it. She runs through the grass and leaps into the air to try and swat at the balloon and misses by several feet.

“C’mon, old girl,” Isaac says, grunting when he lifts her into the air. She hits it and laughs delightedly.

Scott opens up the door before they even get to the porch.

“You’ve gotta be really quiet, Vic, okay?” he says. He squats down to give her a hug. “Mal’s just a little baby. You don’t want to scare him.”

She mimes zipping up her lips and throwing away the key. Scott laughs and beckons them all inside.

Allison is sitting on the couch in the living room, Malcolm tucked into the crook of her arm. She looks worn out but smiles sleepily at them when they walk in. Mal opens his eyes and stares around, locking his eyes on Victoria’s face when she walks up.

“Hey, there,” she whispers to him, reaching out to touch his tiny hand. “I’m your big cousin Victoria. Nice to meet you.”

Stiles is on the couch next to Allison coaxing Malcolm into his arms without Isaac even realizing he’s moved. He looks up at Isaac, grinning, and says, “Hey, wanna steal another?”

Allison takes the baby back.

“We come bearing gifts,” Isaac says, offering Scott the backpack Stiles had dropped unceremoniously next to the door. He takes it and puts it down next to the television.

“Thanks, man.”

 “It’s some of Vic’s old baby things. Toys, some of the more androgynous clothes since you couldn’t make it _easy_ and have a girl…”

“But hey,” Stiles says, easing himself off the couch, “if he ever wants to try it out, we’ve got loads of princess dresses over at our place.”

Scott throws a stuffed turtle at him. Isaac catches it and tosses it back.

“He’s cute,” Stiles says. “You done good, my friend.”

“Well, I mean.” Scott gestures vaguely towards Victoria, who is making faces at Mal.

“Come see him, Isaac,” Allison calls. She’s a lot more like the Allison he’d known before than she had been the night they had shown up on the front porch. Isaac crosses the room dutifully and crouches down next to the couch’s arm, peering over to see.

Malcolm looks a lot more like Allison than Victoria ever had, but his eyes are all Scott. He’s sucking vehemently on a pacifier and grabs Isaac’s finger when he offers it. Victoria goes away to root through the backpack by the door and Isaac vaguely hears Stiles telling her off.

He looks up at Allison and she smiles at him.

“Here’s your start,” he whispers to her and she leans closer to press their foreheads together.


End file.
